Pure Life: Draining Pakistan Dry

A leading bottled water company is draining third world resource rich countries dry to make its Pure Life bottled water, destroying the countries’ natural resources before forcing its consumers to buy their own water back.

Advertisement

Barely 15 days old, Kinza whimpers at an Islamabad hospital where she is suffering from diarrhoea and a blood infection, a tiny victim among thousands afflicted by Pakistan´s severely polluted and decreasing water supplies.

Cloaked in a colourful blanket, Kinza moves in slow motion, like a small doll. Her mother, Sartaj, does not understand how her daughter became so ill.

“Each time I give her the bottle, I boil the water,” she tells.

But Sartaj and her family drink daily from a stream in their Islamabad neighbourhood — one of several waterways running through the capital that are choked with filth. Boiling the water can only do so much.

They are not alone. More than two-thirds of households drink bacterially contaminated water and, every year, 53,000 Pakistani children die of diarrhoea after drinking it, says UNICEF.

Cases of typhoid, cholera, dysentery and hepatitis are rampant. According to the UN and Pakistani authorities, between 30 and 40 percent of diseases and deaths nationwide are linked to poor water quality.

And it is costing the developing country billions. In 2012 the World Bank, which has warned that “substantial investments are needed to improve sanitation”, estimated that water pollution costs Pakistan $5.7 billion, or nearly four percent of GDP.

Now the corporation is moving into Pakistan and sucking up the local water supply, rendering entire areas uninhabitable in order to sell mineral-enriched water to the upper class as well as people in the US and EU. Meanwhile the poor watch their wells run dry and their children fall ill from consuming dirty and contaminated water.

They must stop making Pakistan’s villages uninhabitable by stealing their water.

The aggressive water grab is already descending like a plague on parts of Pakistan. In the small village of Bhati Dilwan, villagers have watched their water table sink hundreds of feet since Nestlé moved in.

Children are getting sick from the foul-smelling sludge they’re forced to choke down. Meanwhile, the company spends millions marketing “Pure Life” to wealthy Americans, Europeans, and Pakistanis who can afford to watch their kids grow up healthy. This scenario is played out again and again in countries around the globe. But this is where we say: enough!

Dirty and contaminated water kills more children around the world than AIDS, malaria, war, and traffic accidents combined — and major corporate bottled water consortium’s might have to take a massive chunk of the blame.

At the World Water Forum in 2000, The bottled water seller lead the way in fighting against defining access to water, a universal right. Big corporations won out, and government officials around the globe officially downgraded water’s classification to a “need” instead, meaning it could be captured, commoditized, and exploited by major corporations without regard for local populations.

Water is a human right. Stop stealing it from communities around the world.

All major mineral water bottling brands have been made aware of the problem and also confronted on a number of issues in the past year. People have spoken out against them as an attempt to patent Nigella sativa, a cure-all remedy that millions of people around the world have used for thousands of years. People have battled and raised stern concerns and slogans against the theivery and water extraction practices in Canada last year.

This may cost Pakistan dearly, with India building more than two hundred dams in Indian Occupied Kashmir depriving Pakistan of their much needed water supply, environmental changes, lack of dams and reservoirs in Pakistan or a proper water storage mechanism has helped exacerbate the ‘water issue’ to new heights.

If they succeed in putting their heinous plan to action in Pakistan then this will surely spell doom for the local populace which is already deprived of drinkable and usable water.

Pakistan being an Agricultural land in essence, may suffer detrimental losses if this mass water exploitation gets underway.